Why You Don't Need a Co-Founder to Start | Dave Morin, Offline Ventures

0:00Dave Morin:85 % of the companies that get started in this town fail. Most startups fail because the relationships don't work out. Not because the product idea was bad or the market wasn't there. The design of the team is as important as the design of the product. If you're a second-time founder, you have the prior version of you as your co-founder, which is pretty great. What's the bear case for solo founding? Most people are so afraid to start that just starting is the hardest thing of all. What's the case for solo founding? The good news is that it's never been easier to do that. Prototyping has never been easier.

0:32Dave Morin:Accessing capital has never been easier. You believe that solo founding means literally being alone. This will not lead you to a good place. If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. I know that you really like the book The Alchemist. I also really like it. It's one of my favorite books growing up, and I was flipping through it actually earlier today, and I just looked at the inside cover, and it felt like this perfect way to start things off. And again, never tried this with a book before. Never read into a microphone, so bear with me. But it starts off with, My heart is afraid that it will have to suffer, the boy told the alchemist one night as they looked up at the moonless sky.

1:15Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself, and that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams. Quite the opener. I'm curious sort of what the alchemist means to you and sort of how you think about that idea of suffering, because I think that oftentimes people talk about entrepreneurship and starting things that are difficult as something that involves a lot of suffering.

1:40Dave Morin:Yeah, I mean, I love that quote because it talks about the fear of suffering is actually the thing that the heart fears the most. And I think that that's often the thing that I end up talking to people who are thinking about becoming founders is you're trying to convince them that starting a company, starting, you know, going on a mission, is freedom. It's actually freedom from suffering. But most people are so afraid to start that just starting is the hardest thing of all. And I think that both The Alchemist and another one of my favorite books from high school, The Celstein Prophecy, which nobody really talks about anymore, but they're both about these people that go on these journeys, and they have to trust their intuition and they have to learn a lot of lessons along the way about trusting themselves in their own power and the universe and the world to provide for them.

2:50Dave Morin:Entrepreneurship is a lot like this where when you start, one of the things you don't realize is that just by setting the intention to go do it, the whole world conspires to help you along the way. and most people don't believe this. They believe that if I start, nobody's going to help me, I'm going to fail, I'm not going to be able to recruit anyone, I'm not going to be able to build a great product. There's like this entire litany of things that people go through in their minds and they're all like normal fears that we all have and what they don't realize is if you just start just by setting that intention and sending that message out into the world and telling everyone, I am starting, I'm going on this mission.

3:40Dave Morin:Everyone tries to help you. And the world begins to unlock. And so many coincidences start happening and synchronicities. And that's the beautiful thing, I think, about being a founder and going on one of these journeys is how the world kind of opens up to you. And The Alchemist is kind of one of the great stories of this. You know, it's a really beautiful story. The writing is so simple and so kind of, sort of, it's really emotional to read it. You know, I have to reread it again soon. I should too. It's been a while and I've been, my oldest son is 12. And I've been wondering whether he's about ready.

4:23Dave Morin:I think it's perfect age. Yeah. The, you know, the, the character of Santiago, he's a, he's a Shepard and he essentially sets off on his own, which I think is interesting too, because, you know, obviously entrepreneurship comes in many forms. And for the longest time, you know, co-founders were kind of the default way of making companies. And, you know, now we're starting to see sort of things change. You know, this year about 40 % of companies have been started solo. Oh, wow. I hadn't heard that stat. That's interesting. Yeah. So that's from Carta and that's up from under 25 % five years ago.

5:04Wow. So we've seen this significant increase. The reason I think it's interesting about this idea of going off kind of on your own is because you're not actually on your own. There's all of these other people who are sort of involved when it comes to building a company. I'm curious kind of how you think about the journey sort of building sort of solo, getting started solo versus co-founders and kind of how that might impact sort of the, some aspects of this being maybe more personal, potentially more lonely. But I'm curious, you know, when you think about that journey of sort of starting off on your own, you know, when you're, when you're with friends, it's like a road trip, you know, but when you're on your own, it's, it's like a pilgrimage in a way.

5:45So I'm curious how you think about that.

5:48Dave Morin:Yeah, I'm trying to remember that old proverb, you know, if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. Yeah. Well, I think that that's an interesting stat to start off with because perhaps more than ever, we are not alone in the world anymore, right? Like people live, you know, an enormous amount of their life online these days. you know social media has made it possible to feel not alone pretty much all your waking hours if you want to right and maybe that's a big driver obviously AI has become in the last two years three years an enormous input into this people are you know I think if you used to lay in bed talking to a friend over text message or when I was a you know younger it was AOL instant messenger today you're like talking to AI and you're able to explore your thinking and get input into the next actions you want to take in the world tomorrow in a way that just wasn't available a few years ago so in those ways those stats make sense to me I think that the other thing is that the process of being an entrepreneur, the je ne sais quoi behind that, has become extremely available.

7:24Dave Morin:When I was getting going in Silicon Valley in the early 2000s, it was a dark art. You had to learn through mentorship. You had to find one of the few angel investors or venture capitalists that really understood the art or get mentored by the prior generation entrepreneurs. And, you know, some of it was on the internet, but there was no YouTube, right? Like when I first got here, like YouTube didn't exist. And so it was like, there was this book and that book. And today, you know, you can, YouTube can be your co-founder, you know, ChatGPT can be your co-founder. OpenClaw can be your co-founder, right?

8:10Dave Morin:And so I think that's one of the huge changes that's happened in the last couple of years. I'm really curious, and we'll talk about some of these founders, solo founders that you've worked with, because you've worked with a lot of them, Ben from Pulsia, Peter from OpenClaw, many others. The thing that I think is really interesting is sort of, I think that oftentimes people think of, you know, startups as technology companies, which makes sense, but I think that they're also like works of art. And I'm curious sort of how you think about the art form of startups. I know that you're really interested in craft and design, but even beyond sort of craft and design, how do you think about the art form of startups?

8:57Dave Morin:Yeah, I mean, it's funny you bring that up. I'm from Montana originally, and a lot of my friends ask me, what is it that you do for your job? Because it can seem like this opaque thing, right? And I actually think of myself as a producer, not an investor, because it's easier to explain what I do in the context of music than it is technology. and I always explain to people I'm like well you've probably seen musicians you know in the studio like on MTV when we were kids you'd see like behind the music or you know I think people are always interested in what goes on behind the songs that they're interested in and so you you generally see this scene of like an artist in a booth recording a song and then there's people behind the soundboard helping to make that happen and so I've always thought of what I do with technology and with entrepreneurs as production, right?

9:59Dave Morin:And that it is art. And that the journey of going on creating something is as much, like you said, it's a human endeavor, it's a relational endeavor, as much as it is the technology itself. I mean, most startups fail because the relationships don't work out, right? Not because the product idea was bad or the market wasn't there or some other factor. It's that the relationship between you and the creative collaborators that are working on the art doesn't work out. And we see this happen in music all the time, too. Like bands don't stay together, right? And you don't get to hear your favorite music anymore.

10:41Dave Morin:And I think oftentimes that's what's happening behind your favorite apps not working out or your favorite apps changing. I was seeing this morning that, you know, I won't say which one, but there's an app out there on X today that everybody's talking about and wondering what happened. Like, why did the UI change? And why is it so frustrated? A lot of people are very frustrated. And I think it's because the relationships changed and the creative, you know, something about the band changed, right? And the music's different. And so now the app's not great. And so that's one of the ways that I think about it.

11:24The other thing that I like to think about is this idea of authorship. And, you know, with authors, you know, Paulo Coelho, J.K. Rowling, these are people who, you know, they wrote their stories themselves, but there's so many more people involved in creating, you know, the actual works. I mean, if you think about Harry Potter, I think that most people, putting aside even the films, I think that most people can remember when they were growing up, they can remember seeing the covers of these books. And that probably had a really big impact on them. So just the art alone, let alone the editing, the typesetting, there were so many people involved in actually making that work.

12:01And it kind of reminds me of startups in the same way, it's that there's so many artists involved in making these things. It's not there's like one sole artist or in music as well. It also makes me think of film, right? Which is like they talk of these ideas like auteur filmmakers. And there's Alfred Hitchcock, but he also works, he's supposedly very controlling, but he works with Edith Head, who's like the most influential costume designer of all time. She was the one who was actually sort of calling the shots there. So even these sort of like auteur, sort of like highly in control, creators, you know, are still sort of deferring to incredible talent.

12:43I'm curious how you've seen that for people who are, it doesn't need to be solo founders specifically, but for people who are sort of founder CEOs, sort of how they've had this high degree of thoughtfulness and care and sort of a high degree of opinionate, sort of being opinionated, but also, you know, not necessarily trying to like call all the shots and sort of making sure that they have great people that they trust to actually do this. The Hitchcocks of the startup world.

13:12Dave Morin:Yeah. I mean, I think that entrepreneurship, artists, no one's alone, right? Like you learn this. I don't know. I have three kids. And one of the things you learn having kids is that no one grows up alone, right? My three and a half year old is like this amazing, she's like amazing to watch. And, you know, you go around the world and like we were in Las Vegas last weekend to go to the sphere. And a friend of mine, a friend of mine knows the Backstreet Boys manager. And so we were like in Vegas, you know, I've, I've never seen the Backstreet Boys. It was pretty great, actually. but I watch my daughter walk around and you know she walks the wrong way and there's always an adult to help her go the right way right none of us grow up alone right and you realize this really quickly having kids and I think the great artists the great entrepreneurs they're actually people who are willing to put themselves out there to try to find creative collaborations to find relationships with people.

14:28Dave Morin:And they're not afraid to, you know, search and search and search for the next great relationship that might create better creativity. And that's at least how I've certainly looked at life. And a lot, again, how I look at what I do is I'm always in search of that experience, right? And it's different for everyone, right? We all go through life trying to find romantic partners and business partners and places to work and these types of things. And some people close up and they choose not to try to find the next great collaborator. But I actually think one of the things that defines the best entrepreneurs, the best founders, is a willingness to try to find great people to collaborate with in the way that works best for you.

15:21Dave Morin:And so, you know, I'm sure Alfred Hitchcock found that in, you know, in Edith. And that became a lifelong, you know, collaboration for him, I believe. And, you know, I started my career at Apple, right? And I was lucky enough to, you know, be there at a really cool time when Steve Jobs was trying to rebuild the company. And, you know, when the story goes that when he came back to Apple, he was looking around for who to collaborate with and he found Johnny Ive. Right. And that collaboration, which turned into a very long term, you know, relationship and collaboration was an enormous part of making Apple into the Apple we know today.

16:03Dave Morin:And so I think it's important to think about this, that the relationships in a way are the product. and one last thing I'll say on this when Steve Jobs died I was talking to Johnny back then it was when I was working on Path and Johnny was actually helping me and I was helping him a little bit with Apple stuff and I remember he said something to me that really hit me pretty hard he said to me at one point Dave the design of the team is as important as the design of the product and that's really stuck with me ever since. And I think that's the true answer to your question, which is just that you can be alone, you can be a solo artist, but you're always going to be in massive collaboration, not just with the creatives around you, but ultimately with the customers, you know, and the sort of the listeners, the people out there, the community of people that care about your product.

17:06Dave Morin:You're going to be in relationship with them. You're not alone. And I think that's, that's, that's one of the keys to doing great art. I think, I think it was either Phil Lasher, Jerry Garcia, who said like, it's yours now, the music is yours. You know, it's like, as soon as the band plays it and it's off, it's, it's no longer the bands. It's the, you know, and that's in many ways, it's the same thing. It's the, it's the customers, it's whatever they're using the products for. And I think this is actually a really interesting sort of transition to talking about Peter and talking about, you know open claw because there's this very interesting dynamic with that project and you know it's it's not a company in in the traditional sense it's you know it's this incredible sort of open source project now it's a foundation um but there's something really special about sort of art yeah it's art it totally is art and um there's something so special about the way it started but also the way that people have been brought in over time you know it is not just peter's it's it's the world's and there's so many I forget how many uh individual contributors who have you have actually made made changes to the code base at this point but so many probably more than most any project of its of its vintage thousands yeah yeah we have more people contributing than most of the labs have employees yeah it's incredible so maybe share a little bit more about sort of how you first came into contact with Peter I mean he he actually to my to my knowledge he solo bootstrapped his company to great success that he kind of came out of retirement because he was just so interested in, you know, all of this stuff that was happening with AI.

18:41And then after many name changes, you know, OpenClaw. But I'd be very curious to hear sort of how you first got involved with Peter and started working on this together.

18:50Dave Morin:Yeah, so I'm in this group chat from late 90s, early 2000s, friends of mine that have always been amazing internet artists, hackers, tinkerers. And one of my buddies from that sent me a message in December asking, this is December 2025, and asked me, you know, hey man, you got to check out this Clodbot thing. And I was in Montana with my family for the holidays and I was kind of busy and I was actually like kind of solemn. I wasn't sure like what 2026 was going to bring at that point in time. and so I didn't check it out the first day and then the second day I installed it and within like less than I don't know 12 hours I had this feeling that I hadn't felt since I was a little kid.

19:53Dave Morin:When I was like seven years old my grandfather gave me a Macintosh computer and when he put it on my desk and I turned it on and I started using it I had this just feeling that I could create anything and that it was mine and it was this powerful tool that like I mean it blew my mind I mean in a way it set the chart it charted the course for the rest of my life like that Macintosh computer became the thing that I created art on right and to this day it's like you know It's still the tool that's with me everywhere I go. Do you still have the original one? Yes. Yeah. It's still on my desk, my childhood desk.

20:38Dave Morin:And the second time I had that feeling was when I first saw Facebook. I was working at Apple. And Facebook just blew my mind and sort of charted my course through Silicon Valley in a way. Like, you know, I'd gone to Apple, but when I saw Facebook, it really just like, I really fell in love with the idea of social networks. And I had been paying attention to social networks and, you know, there was MySpace and LinkedIn and all these things. But like Facebook, there was something about it that, you know, within 24 hours, I was like, I need to go wherever the founders of this are. And I need to find them and figure out how I can help.

21:22Dave Morin:And I felt that same way about ClawedBot, now OpenClaw. And so, you know, within 24 hours, I was figuring out who created this and also just falling in love with it in a way. And I think that's the other thing about entrepreneurship and about creativity is that it involves love and falling in love. and as much as people talk about missions and visions and things like this, I think love is an enormous part of this and being in love with something really matters and I fell in love with Open Claw immediately and so I immediately set out to figure out who's behind this and found Peter and we started DMing on Twitter and then DMing on iMessage and just started talking every day And I said to him, I'm like, I don't know where this is going, but I know that everyone needs to experience it in the world.

22:27Dave Morin:And I'm in love with it. And we need to protect it at all costs. And I don't know if it's a company or a movement or what, but I'd love to help, you know, and I'd love to, you know, do whatever I can. And so that kind of started Peter and I's collaboration. And it hasn't stopped since. And as January went on, it just got bigger and bigger. And, you know, the story goes from there. You know, oftentimes, you know, startups take a long time to sort of find residents and get off the ground. But there's also these other companies where it sort of feels like they immediately release something and it just takes off.

23:08It's a hit. Facebook is an example, obviously. OpenClaw is another one, even though it's not your standard company. I'm curious sort of how you think about having invested in so many companies and worked with so many founders over the years, how you think about kind of those two different types of companies because ultimately we've seen so many stories of the company that, you know, they keep going and they eventually find something that works and it's great and that everybody makes it feel like it was an overnight success in the press or whatever. But I'm curious sort of how you juxtapose those two sort of trajectories with successful companies?

23:46Dave Morin:I mean, I think that founders generally know something about... Their idea is usually related to some kind of inner knowing that they have about whatever it is they're trying to do. And oftentimes they can't express it in words. and they're trying to express it into software or business or something where they feel like they live in the future, they know something about the future that they're trying to express. And so I think that's, and I hear this from friends that are in music, right? They're like trying to express themselves in a way. Sometimes it doesn't work, right? And they have to try again and try again or they need to get customers or get listeners.

24:42Dave Morin:And then once that feedback loop starts to happen, then the creativity begins to come. And so I don't actually think about it as different. The two types, I don't differentiate. I think that everyone's doing this thing, participating in this creative act. And sometimes that expression comes out immediately and it becomes a hit, I guess. And sometimes you have to travel along. I think Andreessen Horowitz has a great saying, idea maze, right? Where it might take two or three companies. Like I always say to the founders that I work with that this might be the first one, but you're probably gonna do three more.

25:29Dave Morin:And I wanna invest in all of them. Like I wanna be on the journey across all the companies with you, not just the first one, right? 85 % of the companies that get started in this town fail. And so the majority case is failure, even though we never talk about it. Like nobody ever, I don't know, nobody ever does podcasts about the fails, right? Which is kind of strange to me. I guess it's just maybe part of the human condition that we don't talk about it, or it's too painful or something. But I guess that's the way I look at it is that, you know, your job as the founder is to do the creative act, be in it, right?

26:09Dave Morin:Participate in the suffering, you know, go through trying to express that thing that you know inside of yourself. And sometimes the configuration is not gonna work. Sometimes the first, the group of people that you work with the first time isn't gonna be the right one. And so you gotta close that one down and try again, right? And work through the grief of losing that. And then, okay, we're going to do it again. We're going to make another album. We're going to make another app, right? And so I think that's the journey. The journey is this, like, inner knowing and trying to pull it out into expression, into a company, into a product.

26:51Dave Morin:And sometimes it hits immediately and other times it doesn't. And I think since you brought up Peter, you know, Peter, he's been an entrepreneur for a long time. um you know he's extraordinary engineer one of the best i've ever worked with and he has he's just an absolute brilliant creative and he also put in the work he he worked in pdf uh you know uh hardcore really hardcore really hardcore engineering right for like a decade and new mac os and all of its details at an engineering level beyond most people, right? And so this is an artist who understood all of the materials. And so when he came into 2025, and here's Claude, and here's agentic engineering, he was able to apply, you know, do his art at an unbelievably fast and beautiful fast speed in a beautiful way.

27:59Dave Morin:Right. And so I think you have to look at it as here's an extremely practiced creative that given these new tools was able to do magical things. I'm really curious when you, when you sort of see people go from company to company, kind of what you feel like you've learned about them, what they learn about themselves. You know, Ben, you know, you've backed, I think multiple times now he's now building Pulsia. He was on the, he was the first episode on this, this podcast, I guess, five and a half months ago. Oh, I didn't realize he was first. Yeah, he was very first. Cool. Um, so I'm curious, I'm curious kind of, you know, what, what you've learned about working with people across multiple companies and what maybe they learned about themselves.

28:40Yeah.

28:41Dave Morin:I mean, Ben and Pulsia are, are such a cool story. You know, uh, I backed Ben's first company. Uh, this was 15 years ago. I think it was around 2010, 2011. I've always seen Ben as like a great artist. I mean, he's always been this extraordinary creative. You can like see it in his eyes. And he's from Paris and has this really cool perspective. I've actually worked with a bunch of founders from Paris. I love working with founders from Paris. Like they, you know, they have a totally different point of view. And they actually, more than any founder, see it as art, right? And I think that's like built into Paris, right?

29:25Dave Morin:And Ben, you know, he went on that journey. The first thing he worked on didn't work out. He did some other things and went and worked with Travis Kalanick for a long time, built an incredibly successful part of the Cloud Kitchens business. And one of the cool things is, I think if you approach this, I guess, the way that I have, founders come back and they want to work with you again. And so Ben showed up here in Mill Valley when he wanted to start his next thing a few years ago. And he was actually working on a totally different idea than Pulsia. and it was called Gift Shop. And one of the things he had seen from working on Cloud Kitchens is that local businesses had better brands in their town than large luxury brands.

30:28Dave Morin:And so he wanted to create a merch business that enabled all small businesses to have this amazing merch that was high quality and you know uh etc and so they created this thing called gift shop and his co-founder was a really uh amazing parisian like i would call him an auteur artist uh matthew and he's he's like extraordinary and we can talk about him another time but um ultimately they decided that they weren't good co-founders and wanted to go it alone so we we split the company in two and Ben decided to go on another journey. He basically started over. And the interesting thing about Ben's journey is that we were on a trip to Japan together.